Classroom Escape Food Labels

The classroom Escape Food Label Notebook cover

The Classroom Escape games are paper-based word and math problems for students 7th grade and above. They introduce information, and ask questions regarding the application of that material. To engage your students, the questions are woven into a story, with some questions involving puzzles that must be solved as part of the answer. To help ensure that students can figure out the problems and puzzles, they work in small teams.

The first game in the series, Food Labels, involves understanding and applying food labels in a practical way. There are four exercises. In each exercise, the students are told they are training to teach government agents how to read food labels to stay healthy on the job. Each team gets an information sheet and the first of 10 problem sheets. Each sheet has between 1 and 4 questions. Upon completion of the first sheet, they get their second, then their third, and so on. Each exercise is independent, but students can play more than one during different class periods to gain additional information.

Students learn such things as finding the calories per serving on a food label or nutrition web site, finding the number of servings in a container, how to convert from the grams per serving listed on food labels to calories, how to calculate the calories in a meal, that vitamins, minerals, and fiber are important, that “empty calories” should be limited, how to compensate for overeating, and much more.

The package includes teacher’s instructions, practice exercise, optional discussion questions, and four sets of exercises. Each exercise includes the student problems and the teacher’s answer key. For teachers that are not familiar with the material, the package includes hints for the teacher and students, plus all answers and how they were achieved. The student material comes in both printed and electronic forms for ease of making the student’s copies. The generous site license covers one school campus; multiple licenses are not required to cover different teams.

Classroom Escape was introduced at the AAFCS convention in Dallas in June, 2017. Many teachers said things like, “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” “This is great,” and “I teach food labels, and this is better than anything else I have seen.”

Classroom Escape is appropriate for both classrooms and homeschool environments, as well as other groups like youth groups.

Below is a demo of Classroom Escape, Food Labels. The demo is a very simplified version of the actual product, but hopefully gives an idea of the game.

The teacher introduces the exercise – “You will be divided into small teams to do a special exercise. Each team will be responsible for helping secret government agents learn how to read food labels and web site nutrition information so that the agents can stay healthy on their demanding jobs. This means that you must learn how to read food labels and web site nutrition information, too.

Secret agents like to use codes, so you will sometimes need to use some as well”

This demo will follow a team using the Nutritionist exercise, one of the 4 exercises included in the product. The teacher has decided to call this team, “Alpha”, to differentiate this team from other teams doing the Nutritionist exercise.

Each team is given a food label sheet, restaurant nutrition web page sheet, and their first problem sheet. For some reason, the images of the student materials are fuzzy in the popup window, but they are not like that in real life.

1 – To review the DemoFood Label given to Team Nutritionist Alpha, click here.

2 – To review the Demo Restaurant Web Page given to Team Nutritionist Alpha, click here.

4 – When the team asked the teacher for help, the teacher asked what their team name was, and what problem they got stuck on. They said, “Team Nutritionist Alpha, problem 1b”. The teacher looked in the answer key, found the Nutritionist section, and looked for problem 1b. Click here to see the Demo Problem Page 1 Answer Key.

5 -With the teacher’s help, Team Nutritionist Alpha solved all the problems on page 1 of their exercise, so the teacher gave them page 2. To see Demo Problem Page 2, click here

6 – The teacher asked what their team name was, and what problem they got stuck on and they said, “Team Nutritionist Alpha, problem 2b”. The teacher looked in the answer key and found the Nutritionist section, problem 2b. Click hereto see the Demo Problem Page 2 Answer Key.

End – Using the help from the teacher, Team Nutritionist Alpha held problem sheets 1 and 2 together, up to a light. Box 1 revealed a clue, which helped them determine the correct answer for Problem 2b.

Team Nutritionist Alpha turned in sheet 2, and got problem sheet 3, followed by 4, etc., up to page 1.